Reading Anund & Qviberg’s new guide book on Medieval Uppland, I came across a great religious legend: “The Grateful Dead“. (The band got its name from a dictionary entry on this family of stories.) The earliest version of the legend is found in the German Cistercian prior Caesarius of Heisterbach’s 13th century book of miracle…

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Rolling Stones’s first gig, at the Marquee Club in London. Journalist Hanspeter Kuenzler and Bavarian e-book publishers The eBook People GmbH celebrate the occasion with a massive illustrated two-volume biographical anthology in English on the band. Counting the pages in an e-book is of course difficult. But…

Tomas Romson asked me a good question. Why do archaeological layers form in such a way that older things end up buried below newer ones? The answer is, because people and natural processes deposit dirt on the ground. Using a word borrowed from geology, we call the study of such layers stratigraphy. Imagine a Neolithic…

Yesterday Jrette, her buddy and I went down to Ströja in Kvillinge outside Norrköping and had a look at the mead-hall excavation I’ve blogged about. Arkeologikonsult’s Björn Hjulström very kindly showed us around. The site will become an Östergötland classic, not only for the 6th century manor hall but also because of its long habitation…

I have four pleasant things on my desk at the moment: Finally my first uni job! Humble but very important to me. I’ve been asked to teach Swedish landscape archaeology to exchange students in English for about 100 hours during the autumn term. Start 4 Sept. A commission for an encyclopedia article on Viking gaming.…

Sweden’s traditionally divided into 25 landskap provinces. They live on in people’s minds despite having been superseded by a new län division in 1634. The boundaries of the landskap go way back into prehistory, and so they don’t respect the country’s cities much, these generally being much later in origin. Stockholm is a case in…

My book Mead-halls of the Eastern Geats appeared last September. On p. 9 I wrote: Splendid single finds, though never surveyed comprehensively, offer a rough idea of where elite settlements might be sought. But little is known about individual elite settlements in 1st millennium Östergötland. Not one of the Beowulfian mead-halls of this book’s title,…

This musical style was invented by the Pixies in the mid 80s. Their early work was a main source of inspiration for Curt Cobain of Nirvana. Now Cage the Elephant have recreated the early Pixies style from its blueprints and written a song about Cobain’s birthplace in Washington state. I like it! In other rock…